Create an #AAA2013 Google Calendar

UPDATE: There is now an official meeting app.

Attending the AAA? Want to easily see all the schedule of panels you wish to attend in Google Calendar?  Here’s mine (though it will likely be deleted and replaced with a newer version before the meeting).

Here are some quick tips, since all the steps aren’t immediately obvious.

  1. Login to the AAA website.
  2. Click Personal Scheduler in the sidebar on the right. (Or just use the link provided here.)
  3. Search and add a few panels to your schedule.
    • Check your schedule for overlaps. (You can save events as bookmarks if you don’t want them to show in your calendar.)
  4. Use the print button at the top.
    • There are two buttons, one will just print the current webpage, you want the other one.
  5. You need to select “Download to PDA”
    • Not obvious that this also works for Google Cal, but it does. It will give you the option to create a Google Calendar ICS file and download it to your computer.
    • Also, when was this software created? Does anyone call a smartphone a PDA anymore?
  6. Then go to Google Calendar and create a new calendar into which you’ll import this file.
    • You can use an existing calendar, but I’d advise against that, in case you want to easily delete this one and start again after making changes to your program.
    • When creating the calendar, be sure to set it to the time zone in Chicago. Google can be very finicky when you use multiple time zones. I believe setting this option here will avoid problems, but no promises. (Another reason to use a separate calendar for the conference.)
    • You can also choose whether to make the calendar public or private.

If you make it public you can share it on Twitter with your friends using the #aaa2013 hashtag, or share it with us in the comments. See you in Chicago!

9 thoughts on “Create an #AAA2013 Google Calendar

  1. Great Timing! I had actually just thought to myself I was going to have start putting all my stuff into my google calendar now for the AAAs. But the Personal Scheduler was super helpful.
    Thanks 🙂

  2. Kerim: attendance at paper sessions may be one of those triumphs of hope over experience! I attended my first AAA meetings many years ago as a young grad student and was struck by the poor quality of the papers I dutifully sat through. My advisor, who was just as guilty as anyone of promising too much with a seductive title and intriguing abstract, pointed out to me that most people wouldn’t get travel support to the Meetings unless they read a paper, so the motivation for presenting was often more financial than scholarly, and the papers were too often dashed off at the last minute just to have something to present. Cynical, I know, but over the decades I’ve heard too many papers that should never have been presented. I think the worst was a presentation by a prominent anthropologist working in the STS realm, who brought a 50 page paper that was a book chapter draft, and with no preparation spend 15 minutes reading random sentences and paragraphs. Utterly incomprehensible. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

    I tend to spend my AAA time networking (do people still use that term?), setting up publishing or research contacts, meeting old friends, etc. I read through the abstracts to get a good sense of what’s happening in the discipline these days — abstracts tend to reflect what people want to be said, rather than what they manage to say in the presented version of a paper, and so may be a more reliable guide to a discipline in which a small number of people push ideas forward and the rest of us offer an iteration of those ideas in our respective field sites. I have the luxury of not having to worry about the costs of attending the Meetings (being married to a cardiologist is highly recommended), so I don’t present unless I have something to say and can take the time to prepare it well; if only some of our colleagues had the same freedom….

    This sounds grumpy and cynical at 6 a.m. on a Monday, but I write with a smile — the Meetings are fun either way, and while I have often regretted wasting time sitting through a weak presentation, I’ve always enjoyed the Meetings as a whole. And with global warming, Chicago is much more comfortable in November than it was many years ago when I was a student there!

  3. Hi, Rex — I’m in Washington, D.C., so Chicago may be closer to my neck of the woods than it is to your neck of the woods! Yes, I’ll be there, and look forward to seeing many Savage Minds contributors in person….

  4. After reading this, it occurs to me it might actually be faster and easier to just enter the data manually. I think that’s what I’ll do (if I can find my PDA, that is).

  5. So, did you notice that the app does use any credentials? So, if you want to know where someone plans to be during the conference, then just find their email address and pop it into the mobile and tada: full access.

    I seriously question the AAA’s technological choices sometimes. At least the drop down menu on the AAA site was fixed after years of it having odd gaps between the menu and the drop down boxes…

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